


Triple Time

by gidget_goes



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Genie/Djinn, Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Renaissance, Idiots in Love, M/M, Mutual Pining, dragons and djinnee and magic oh my!, this au is either my best work or like totally cracked out, winter holidays
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:21:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21832840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gidget_goes/pseuds/gidget_goes
Summary: Even a centuries-old war or the bitterest of winter storms won’t dull the lavish gleam of Konoha’s royal court. For Gaara and his siblings, though, the glitz of the aristocracy is just a cover. They’ve been sent North by their father on a deadly mission: to retrieve an ancient artefact, powerful enough to end the war – and the nation of Konoha – for good.But when he begins to fall for a kindhearted serving boy, Gaara finds his loyalties are thrown into disarray. Soon enough, he’s questioning his whole quest for victory. Will he remain true to his father, and fight for crown and glory? Or will new bonds and old dreams push him to strive for peace? And can he manage to convince his family that love is greater than any old treasure?(Probably not. Itisa pretty baller artefact.)
Relationships: Gaara/Rock Lee
Comments: 7
Kudos: 24
Collections: GaaLee / LeeGaa Holiday Exchange





	1. Minuet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bushierbrows (wingbones)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wingbones/gifts).



> @bushierbrows –
> 
> i was so excited when i saw all the prompts and tropes you'd sent into the holiday exchange, and it was really difficult to settle on just one fic to write you! this au is the result of several weeks' painful deliberating and several weeks of my coworkers screaming at me to "STOP WRITING NARUTO FANFICTION AND COME CLEAR SOME DAMN TABLES."  
> i'll be posting one chapter a day to ~~maximise exposure~~ ~~revive my blog~~ Avoid overwhelming you with material. so happy holidays! i hope you enjoy reading _Triple Time_ , or that, at the very least, it can provide a getaway from overbearing parental units this holiday season. 
> 
> happy holidays! all my love! 💚♥️

The ground ahead was pockmarked with potholes, and the carriage gave a feverish shiver as they lurched around their latest fork in this latest road. The air was heavy with winter, but heavier still with the disease that seemed to cling so burr-like to the land; every tree they passed seemed skeletal, the sky overcast with pallor. Confined as he was to his corner seat, though, all Gaara could do was thin his lips. He had seen many disasters in his day – caused a few, himself – but the blight to this land still managed to seem foreign.

Across from him, Gaara could see his sister Temari had no such reservations. Her glass-green eyes were wide, made brighter still by the flush dancing across her cheeks. “Oh, it’s always so gorgeous,” she was cooing. “Isn’t it just?”

“I don’t suppose I’ve ever – _urk!_ – ever, ah, seen much quite like it.” The only thing green about Kankuro was his complexion, and his own eyes swam with tears. Gaara knew his brother had never been one for strenuous motion of any sort, and they had been riding for a fortnight.

“Is that all you have to say?” Temari quirked an eyebrow, and Kankuro rolled his eyes. She had avarice in her gaze as she whirled on Gaara. “What about you? What are your thoughts on Konoha?”

“Of course it’s beautiful,” Gaara lied. “Just . . . ” His voice caught, slightly, and Gaara imagined the collar of his tunic strangling the hesitance from his tone. When he spoke again, he’d settled as neatly into diplomacy as the embroidery had his sleeves. “It’s just not as beautiful as home.”

“Nothing is.”

For the first time in a long while, Gaara agreed with his sister. In Suna, the sky shone like sapphires against the pearly brilliance of the sun and moon, and the desert rolled across the horizon like a sheet of hammered gold. The mottled shadows of these sick forests paled in comparison, in more ways than one.

A racking cough from the head of the carriage came to jolt Gaara from his reverie, though it served in equal measure as punctuation to his thoughts. “We’re – _hff! hff!_ – we’re coming up on the castle gatehouse, Your Highnesses.”

Gaara couldn’t tell if their driver’s voice was stiff with disdain or with cough. He was a wiry man with a mess of dark hair, and though he was heading a four-horse carriage, he still smelled like wet dog. Dimly, Gaara remembered his manners.

“Thank you, Mr. Inuzuka.” _That was what Father said, right? “Kiba Inuzuka?”_ Gaara tried for a smile as he rose from his seat, and he was sure to draw his collar higher before he paid Mr. Maybe Kiba Possibly Inuzuka for the ride. He saw Kankuro do the same, and Temari tugged her gloves higher before she, too, crossed the driver’s palm with silver. The plague had yet to ravage Konoha as it had the lands further South – as it had Kumo and Oto, or even Suna, with all their medical advancements – but it was doing its darnedest. They’d suffered a weak harvest and a harsh winter, as well; as the racking cough and staggering fever began working its way over northern borders, Konoha’s people were set to wither.

 _Good,_ thought Gaara. The voice wasn’t necessarily his own, but it was not an unfamiliar one. _Good. They’ll be ripe for the taking._

As ripe as anything was in the North, anyhow.

He pretended not to notice the dirty look on the steward’s face as she drudged forward to bid them welcome, or how the cloudy sky seemed to darken as a gaggle of servants came to help them with their bags. Though the border was calm, and the snow fell unimpeded by trebuchets or flaming arrows, the war was far from over. Even the sick earth beneath his feet seemed to hold a grudge: when Gaara closed his eyes, reaching his energy into the flagstones, he could feel them push up against him. The nation didn’t want them here.

But their father did. And, perhaps more importantly, King Shamon did. He’d been the one to request a peace summit with the warlords of Konoha in the first place, in a desperate bid to end generations of war . . . before it ended him. At eighty-odd winters, the old man was stretched thin across the kingdom’s borders and family ties; his age, his stress, and the plague itself were locked in a fervent race against one another to see which would be the one to end him. And so while he had called for a peace summit – a last-bid effort to heal Suna before he passed – it was well-known he was in no fit state to attend it. Instead, he would send his heirs: the triplet (bastard) children of his only cousin, now that his own children and siblings had been laid to wretched rest by that sweeping sickness.

(Sometimes, Gaara wondered just how sick poor Duchess Chiyo or Baron Sasori had been. On those occasions, he thought of his father’s – the royal alchemist’s – laboratories, and wondered just what lay in those countless little bottles or behind those iron screens. But then His Alchemical Excellency, Lord Rasa would appear, and Gaara would be set back to his duties.)

“ . . . be here shortly.” The steward was a statuesque sort of blonde with a smoky voice, and her eyes blazed like amber under heavy-knit brows and set against deep violet shadows. There was a small purple tattoo set into her forehead, and Gaara wondered, absentmindedly, which of the North’s thousand conquered tribes she must have come from. There was blood soaked deep into the soil beneath his feet. Gaara didn’t need his magic to sense that.

“Thank you, miss.” Temari, at least, had been following along. She was the only one out of all of them to ever have visited Konoha. It was, after all, the home of her—

“Lord Shikamaru!”

 _—her . . . him,_ thought Gaara, dumbly. _Her “Shikamaru.”_

The eldest of the three Konohan warlords was no further out of childhood than any of them were, but he moved with a tired dignity all the same. He wore his dark hair long, plaits peaking out from beneath the hood of an old woollen cloak. There was no crown, no regalia – the only real sign of his status was the fine leather of his boots.

“My princess,” said Lord Shikamaru Nara. For a moment, his dark eyes shone, real affection tugging at his weathered features – but then it was gone. He pressed a chaste kiss to the back of Temari’s hand, before turning to Gaara and Kankuro. “Your Highnesses. I’ve heard . . . ” _Ghost stories. Bloody murder. The very worst things._ “ . . . so very much about you.”

“I’ve written about you two,” said Temari, unnecessarily. “In our letters.”

“Indeed.” Shikamaru turned stiffly on his heel, and he turned a wary gaze on Gaara, black eyes meeting icy blue. He seemed to be searching for the words, but in the end, all to come out was a tiny sigh. “I . . . we just . . . _huh_.” He folded his hands behind his back, and Gaara pretended not to notice how his stare strayed to the dirk at his belt. “You’re powerful,” he said, in the end. “I can feel it.”

This time, it was fear that flickered across the impassive planes of his features, and Gaara watched the sky grow slightly dimmer as Lord Shikamaru’s shadow warped instinctively beneath him. He was an infamous spymaster, even beyond Konoha’s borders, and Gaara knew how literally he cloaked himself in shadows. Still, this was little more than a trick of the light. That was the thing, he liked to think, about Konoha. There was magic here, too, of course: it was sprinkled like sand or gravel over the snowy hills; it took the form of warriors’ battlefield quirks or the odd two-headed cow. But the old magics ran like ravines through Sunan sands, and catastrophic power gathered in pockets and pools throughout the land. In sinkholes that travelled to the centre of the earth, or in storms of locusts and toads. In rivers of blood and . . .

This time, the earth had reacted to Gaara’s anxieties without him realising it, and for a moment, all he could do was dully watch. The courtyard was silent as a flagstone crumbled to sand at his feet, the stones of the gatehouse groaning in protest. Gaara grit his teeth, willing the great plates of magma leagues below them to still – and they did. He could feel it in his bones as easily as he could feel it below them: the earth was calm once more (which meant soon enough, he would be too, heart rate slowing like a rolling stone).

For that was where much of Suna’s old magic had ended up: in the hands of those who didn’t always know what to do with it. Once, it had been a true mark of power. Before the reformation, the people worshipped their kind as gods, and the House of Life had risen from the riverbanks to bring magic to the people through language. Now, they were known as freaks of nature – or, in the case of their father, Lord Rasa, conquests to be taken. Most people went their whole lives without even meeting a djinn. Rasa had not just captured one, and bound it to a bottle, like the myths of old. He’d bedded it, and sired the only three half-human, half-djinn childrenin the world.

“So it’s true.”

The steward spoke without Gaara quite hearing her, but he could feel the flagstones shift beneath her feet as she steadied herself. She looked more regal than any of them – than Lord Shikamaru and his mundane clothes, than Kankuro in his roadsickness, than even Temari, who was dressed in jewels and fineries. “It’s true,” she said again, looking down her nose at the four of them. “They are not just ‘powerful.’ They are the _dhampir_ who—”

“They are our _guests_ , Tsunade.” Shikamaru’s glare was a warning, though his tone was tired as ever. “Now, will you show the princes to their quarters? Her Highness and I have some matters of state to discuss.”

Gaara fought back a smile as Kankuro shot him a look, all arched eyebrows and twitching lips. He was quite sure that their sister’s and their host’s _“matters of state”_ concerned no borders other than those of their tunics, and that the treaties passed between them would read more like sappy poetry. But did it matter? Gaara would have given all the magic in the world to see his siblings free of their courtly duties for once – to get to act their ages, free to explore the sprawling stone fortress and sky-scraping firs of this foreign land.

But then he turned to the steward, Tsunade, and saw her glare had only hardened, ill-disguised contempt pulling at her features as she bade her lord farewell. “ _Dhampir_ ,” she muttered, again. Gaara felt a shiver run down his spine. He was diplomat and polyglot enough to know what it meant – and he was human enough to know she meant it as a curse.

At the edge of the road, some twenty paces ahead of them, a wall of white had shot into the heavy air. It took Gaara a moment to realise it was steam, and sure enough, when it had cleared, a perfect square had been melted into the snow where one of Kankuro’s travelling trunks lay. Ghostly black flames licked at its surface, and the serving girl who’d been tended to it had leapt back, cradling a hand that the protective spells must have burnt. Gaara could only sigh. _“Dhampir”_ was right, really. The people had reason to be scared.

The castle gates swung shut behind them with a resounding _“clang,”_ and Gaara could feel the echo deep in his bones.

Castle Konohagakure had come to life by nightfall, streams of servants and staff coursing floodlike down the halls, and shouts far below them shaking the windows in their wrought-iron panes. Beeswax candles made the wall sconces glow a deep, burnished gold, and the harsh divides between bricks and mortar were soft and nonthreatening in the firelight. To be sure, the old stone fortress showed its age: the red carpet to run like a gold vein down the corridor was threadbare, and there were gouges and scratches in each heavy oak door Gaara happened past. Even so, Gaara stood a little straighter as he wandered down the West Wing. Konoha may have been sick, but its court was defiant.

Their quarters occupied the better part of the westernmost turret, and Gaara could hardly help but marvel as he came to the zenith of the hall’s winding curve. He knew glass was expensive this far north, and it made the spectacle before him all the more impressive. The window stretched ten paces to either side of him, and the snow below them shone along a thousand facets in the fine-cut crystal. But the further up he looked, the harder, he found, it was to see the landscape. Instead, the glass was stained in a spray of vibrant colours, and long lines of lead stretched across its surface like ivy to paint an intricate picture. Even in the dim, Gaara knew what it was, and he whispered it in half-hewn reverence:

“The grail of the Fisher King.”

“Quite the quarry.”

Off the road, Kankuro might as well have been a different person. His craggy features had shifted into an angular smirk, and his dark eyes danced in the candlelight. “Funny how something so little can cause so much trouble,” he went on to muse. When his lips twitched higher, Gaara saw the markings on his face dance, too. He’d wiped off the smudgy kohl he’d been stuck in all week to draw a fresh _wedjat_ across either eye, and a glyph Gaara didn’t recognise on his chin. Unlike his siblings, Kankuro did not rely on his djinn blood to leave his mark on the world around him. He’d taken apprenticeships with artisans and toymakers alike to follow in the footsteps of one of the most infamous magicians of the old House: Imhotep, the puppetmaster.

Sure enough, when he opened a white-knuckled hand, a legion of tiny statues lay in his palm. “ _Ilen en-mar,_ ” whispered Kankuro. “Get the hell up.”

The clay figurines were no larger than spiders, but when Gaara focused, he could see tiny hinges, hear the dull clacking of minuscule gears. “Is it my turn?” he asked, turning narrowed eyes on his brother. Kankuro gave a stiff shrug, and Gaara dug deep.

This was an old trick of theirs. Tiny puppets were innocuous enough, of course – but they’d grown up in the northeastern pockets of Suna, whose bitter, dry steppes made a stark contrast to the lavish riverbanks of the capital. There, people were on high alert when it came to spiders and scorpions, so the two of them had to get creative. Gaara would coat Kankuro’s spies in sand, or fragments of stone. He could change the crystalline structures of even dust if he tried hard enough, ensuring the target would be all but invisible against any earthen background. From, there, all Kankuro had to do was listen to the echoes passing through his statues, and the brothers could spy on most anything.

Of course, the stone halls of the Konohan stronghold were a far cry from their childhood home, and they had concerns beyond birthday presents, now. Gaara finished his work with a tight-lipped frown, and he hoped nobody noticed how he nearly jumped from his skin when a delicate _“ahem!”_ sounded behind them.

“Practicing _sihr_ , are we, boys?”

Kankuro, at least, was quick to snipe back. “Oh, because _you’re_ so afraid of the Good Book.”

Temari shrugged, and lifted a ring-laden hand to toy with the embroidered edge of her hijab. She didn’t wear one often, and she’d made sure, tonight, that this one was pinned just _so_ – just low enough to show the Konohan court the rich gold waves of her hair.Their father liked to reprimand her for her lack of piety, but (this, she would often crow, once she’d ensured he was out of earshot) what should she care? What was some out-of-date God to someone who could create cyclones in her hands?

Gaara didn’t know if he agreed, but he appreciated his sister’s verve. Still, his own kaftan was buttoned high, and he’d opted to leave the jewels and makeup to his siblings. “Shall we?” he asked, after a beat. “We don’t want to keep our own welcome party waiting.”

The grand hall of Castle Konohagakure had little in common with the mosaics and ballrooms of Sunan palaces, but Gaara could not deny it had a unique brand of splendour. The stone ceiling loomed two, three storeys above them, so high they were nearly lost to gloom – Gaara doubted he would have been able to even see those huge, iron chandeliers had it not been for the legions of flickering embers in their crowns. There was no stained glass, no storybook scenes in these windows, but the thick blue glass and heavy black frames made an imposing sight nonetheless; a stark reminder that for every lit candle or torch, the winter still crouched around them, a hungry, patient animal. 

But the Konohans laughed and sang anyway, and the chorus of their foreign voices echoed through their grand hall, fiercely jubilant. Even the bitter steward had plastered a smile to her face, calling the hall to attention to herald their arrival. “We welcome the emissaries of Sultan Shamon of Suna,” she announced. “Their Royal Highnesses, Princess Temari, Prince Kankuro, and Prince Gaara!”

“Hear, hear!”

They’d barely been seated before Gaara had the wind knocked out of him, a hamlike hand slamming into his back with force that could have shattered stone. He felt his bones creak in protest as he turned to meet a wide, scarred smile, and the thundering voice’s echo reached deep into their honeycomb cracks. All Gaara could think to do was bow, and hoped his siblings would do the same. The man, red-haired and red-faced, only guffawed, before he was cut off by a sniff.

“Oh, have _some_ decorum, Choji.”

This next speaker was an icy blonde with cruelly pretty features, and as she sneered, Gaara felt his lips twist into a frown. Logically, he’d known they’d be rubbing elbows with the warlords, but the scramble behind the hall’s high table hardly seemed the time! He’d come expecting a heist, after all, and a war colder than the winter.

Still, the blonde was staring, and Gaara scrambled to match dossiers to people. “Lady Ino,” he choked out, and hastened to bow once more. Ino Yamanaka, the assassin, did not seem impressed. She took her seat with another slight sniff, and left her companion (who could only have been the warrior, Choji Akimichi) to fend for himself.

Their first course was a soup that tasted largely of nothing, and Gaara had barely made it three bland spoonfuls in before the banquet erupted in chaos. In a hall this size, he knew, an echo was more than a sound; sure enough, as a great crash rang off the polished stone floors and long wood tables, Gaara could feel it vibrating deep in his core. All the same, an echo was little explanation. He craned his neck upward, scanning the room in narrow-eyed confusion. Though those attending the high table had materialised from dumbwaiters behind them, there were three lines of servers working on the floor, weaving past the two long tables set up for lesser guests. Rather, there _had_ been three orderly lines there – Gaara had looked up just in time to see a fourth tureen of watery soup tumble to the floor, and the servers scattered like ants as they broke ranks.

“Blast!” Lady Ino’s voice took on a shrill edge in her frustration, and she shouted to nobody and everybody all at once. “We have _guests_!”

“Oh, it’s quite all right, my lady,” Kankuro cooed. He was grinning like a cat that had moved up from canaries to children, his dark eyes gleaming. “Really, no harm done. We all make mistakes.”

A great screech rang through the room as Lord Choji pushed from the table, rushing to help Tsunade shepherd the cleaners pouring from the side entrances. On either side of him, Gaara saw the other two warlords rubbing at their temples, Lord Shikamaru muttering and Lady Ino silently fuming. But neither held his interest for long – he’d caught his brother’s eye, and Kankuro’s smirk stretched even wider as he tucked a tiny figurine into the heavy folds of his galabeya. “Go,” he whispered, fixing Gaara with a pointed look. “I want to know if any of my shabti found the grail yet.”

“We’ve barely been here two hours—”

“And I’d rather not stay. Go on! Git!”

There were all manner of choice words Gaara could think to say to _that_ , but he held his tongue – twisting it hard into his cheek, hoping the dull ache would dispel the din around him. It didn’t work. Curses, both whispered and cried, shot through the hall like crossbow bolts, and the scraping of chairs against stone sent chills down his spine. He could feel a headache building like a sandstorm at the back of his mind, and he found himself taking the first exit he could find: the dumbwaiter behind his seat.

Gaara wasn’t very tall, and he erred on the side of _“scrawny,”_ but he still dropped like a stone. He’d heard rumours of servants and bandits alike using dumbwaiters to sneak around manors and palaces, but surely, he thought now, surely that couldn’t have been true. After all, who would willingly subject themselves to this? To slamming, pell-mell, into stone walls as they crept ever inward; to hurtling through the dark and—

“ _Oof_!”

Any thoughts he might have had were knocked from him with the last of his breath as he tumbled from the dumbwaiter, coherence ebbing away with every flagstone he skidded over. Though he’d spent his childhood falling from horses (princes had to learn to ride, of course, but most horses weren’t keen on djinn) it had done little to prepare him for this. Even as he ground to a halt – his knees slamming into the leg of a table – there was little Gaara could do but try to shake the dizziness from his head.

He was soon to find it wouldn’t dissipate.

“Are you all— oh, my!”

Actually, he might very well have been getting dizzier.

Gaara saw, rather than felt, a pair of strong hands close around his, brown skin gleaming copper in the warm candlelight of the basement he’d fallen into. He’d been searching desperately for his breath, but it had caught in his chest once more, and stars still swam in his eyes. Growing up in the grasslands, and with so much time spent in the desert, Gaara thought he knew the sun, knew blinding light. But he was met now by a smile so dazzling he could scarcely focus: it was all gleaming teeth and starry dark eyes, infinitely brighter than any of the candles dotted around them.

Gaara managed, at last, to blink. It seemed a good first step.

“My lord! Er, your . . . Your Highness!”

Dimly, Gaara registered the words as they came to him, stringing syllables into sentences some part of his addled mind could comprehend. He felt his centre of gravity jostle once more as the foreign hands dropped his, and saw the brilliant smile thin into a flustered frown. Slowly but surely, the shapes hovering in front of him coalesced into a person: a young man – a gorgeous young man – with glossy dark hair and a fighter’s lithe build. His voice was high and earnest; absently, Gaara wondered if his was the kind of voice Temari might have said was _“coloured by smiles.”_ Then he blinked once more, willing his mind to follow along.

“Thank you,” he managed, at last. Fragments of explanations, of diplomatic half-lies, came fluttering into his mind, and Gaara forced a sheepish smile. “I was looking for the dining hall,” he decided to say, tugging at his sleeve. “I must have gotten a bit turned around. Forgive me.”

“A bit!” The young man let out a startled laugh, before clapping his hand over his mouth. “Oh, no, my lord. Your Highness! Er, it is, um, I who should ask for . . . for your forgiveness . . . ”

His hands were never still, straying from the worried lines of his mouth, to his stiff tunic, to his hair, brushed in neat waves over his forehead. There was a part of Gaara that wanted to stop the analysis there: to let himself revel, for a moment, in his face, symmetrical as a summoners’ circle, or his eyes, sparkling in the light like diamonds against jeweller’s velvet. But the real world was coming back to him, in bits in pieces. The floor was gritty and sticky beneath his feet, the air rich with the scent of spices that certainly hadn’t made it into that soup. Voices, unpolished and rude – so different from the nobles’ sniffy remarks – were thrown blindly across the room:

“What do you _mean_ they don’t eat pork? We cooked _pork_!”

“They can have chicken!”

“Chicken doesn’t go with the wine—”

“They don’t drink wine—”

“And, we don’t have chicken, either—”

“Mushrooms!”

“ _Mushrooms_!”

Gaara didn’t realise he was grinning until he felt a faint laugh ghost across his lips. “Are they talking about us? My siblings and I?” he wanted to know.

The young man gave a bashful smile, ducking his head low. His features reminded Gaara of a charcoal sketch, all heavy lines and smooth shadows. “We thought we had an extra day to prepare,” he explained. “Steward got the dates mixed up.”

“It’s quite all right. No harm done.” Kankuro’s sugary lie felt clumsy on his tongue, but Gaara knew his brother was better with words than he was. And he needed that, now: needed to pull the strings as expertly as Kankuro did, in desperate hopes he’d bring the curtains down on this stilted conversation.

But the young man only straightened, and he gave that first smile again, full and bright. “Thank you for your patience, Your Highness,” he said. This time, when he bobbed his head, the rest of him followed in a sweeping bow. “Would you do me the honour of allowing me to escort you to the banquet hall?”

“On one condition.” Gaara spoke without realising it, but when the young man caught his eye, he decided he’d stick to it: folding his arms defensively across chest.

“Of course, your Highness.”

Ahead of them – and above them, probably, and in every eave and rafter of the great stone palace – the staff moved like clockwork, ticking past each other with precision even Kankuro couldn’t disrupt for long. Gaara was struck, suddenly, by the fact that he was in another world. The switch from Suna to Konoha hadn’t, in the end, been that bad, but this . . . this shadow world, this labyrinth beneath the ballroom, was one he’d never even imagined before.

The young man – the serving boy, Gaara might have called him, any other day – was hovering, uneasily, in front of him, and Gaara thrust out his hand. “You call me by name,” he insisted, words tumbling as raucously as the snowfall. “I’m . . . ” _Prince Gaara of the Holy Kingdom of Suna, first of his name, son to—_ “I’m Gaara.”

Gaara started once more when the man’s rough hand brushed his, but he tried to match that sunny smile as he felt his hand jerk up and down (this handshake a great deal more enthusiastic than most diplomats’). “Lee,” he said. “It’s an honour, Your— uh, Gaara.”

The rest of dinner went off without a hitch, unassuming and only sort of bland. When Kankuro asked if the puppets had picked up any news, Gaara fed him some nonsense story about the commotion in the kitchens interfering with any magical signals he could pick up. And when a stream of servants materialised behind them to set out the main course, and Gaara watched Lee give that blinding smile once more, he realised it wasn’t wholly a lie: he _had_ been distracted.

The next day, though, the only thing to blind Gaara was the sun – the real sun – as it glinted off the fresh snowfall, white and cold and unforgiving . . . and as it glared through that great stained glass window, mythical scenes of a long forgotten-treasure shining with burning, lurid light. Every time Gaara closed his eyes, those images remained: burned into his coronas; a steady reminder. And so when chipper, beaming Lee came to his side once more during breakfast, Gaara could manage little more than a genial nod, and a determined stare in his siblings’ direction.

After all, they had work to do.


	2. Quadrille

Gaara woke up with the sunrise, which, according to the great temple clock he could see from his window, happened around noon. To call it _“sunrise”_ was really rather generous: a sliver of light had worked its way through the heavy cloud cover, watery and weak where it hit the snow. The landscape outside of his wide, warped window was a muddled mosaic of greys in the dim morning sun, frosted walkways and snow-covered rocks like so much tarnished silver.

As far as he could tell, Gaara had been awarded the smallest of the guest chambers – but that didn’t mean much. The room loomed before him now like a mausoleum, the stone floors as endless as the mountains around them, the fireplace like some great gaping maw. It was, of course, a far cry from the luxuries – from the silks and fine velvets – of home, but Gaara could still tell no expense had been spared for his comfort. Furs of animals he could never hope to ame were strewn across his four-poster bed, and the rug in front of the fire (always well-stoked) was a fine, if faded, crimson. Gilded embroidery around the edges swirled and eddied like the ocean; Gaara realised, after a beat, he was looking at faded scripture, from some Kiri temple.

Suddenly, Gaara’s throat felt tight, and a chill marched bravely down his spine, in open defiance to the fireplace. His floor was decorated with a prayer mat, to be sure. And those furs had come from somewhere – something had died for his blankets. He didn’t know whether to feel some sick impression or simply ashamed that so many trophies littered his chambers.

There was a manticore’s head above the mantle, and it seemed to be leering at him.

Gaara jumped when the doors did, stiffening as a hearty knock sent the great slabs of oak shaking in their hinges. “Your Highness,” came a high, tremulous voice, “your presence is requested.”

“ . . . Lee?” Gaara had seen him a few more times during his second day in Konoha, and each time, he’d been met by a smile so bright it hurt to look at. He’d explained, after some sharp-elbowed prompting, that he’d met Lee in the kitchens, while trying to track Kankuro’s shabti. They’d taken the story about as well as could be expected, with lots of tittering about new friends and royal scandals. In the end, Temari had deemed young Lee _“endearingly earnest, for someone of such low stature.”_ Kankuro had settled on _“dopey.”_

But Gaara was more of a diplomat than his siblings. He swallowed the past with the last of the water on his nightstand, and called through the door in his most officious voice. “Come in,” he called – just in case he’d mixed up his tenors – and drew his robe tighter around his shoulders, chafed red-raw by the cold.

Lee didn’t seem to have any such problems. Despite the howling winter outside, _his_ complexion was sunkissed and clear (Gaara would have to ask if he had any skincare tips) and he’d even dared to roll up the sleeves of his servant’s tunic, all wiry muscle and neatly folded hands. “Your Highness,” he said once more. Lee had long eyelashes, Gaara noticed, especially for a man, and they cast delicate shadows over his face as he blinked, blinked, blinked. The tiny detail shocked him into a fluster of his own, and he could only splutter as Lee trilled, “Oh! You said you wanted to be referred to by name, didn’t you? My bad!”

It was true – Gaara had never been one for titles, not when he’d only been awarded his through improbable combination of ungodly power and (possible) murder. And as Lee grinned away, looking up through his lashes as he gave a slight bow, Gaara could dimly remember asking him for the favour of that informality. Now, though, all Gaara could think of was the promise of his siblings’ teasing – and the dark undercurrents set to lace their tones, as they inevitably remembered the job they’d come North to do.

After a few drafted excuses – and one instinctive thought of _To what do I owe the pleasure?_ – Gaara tried for a stiff smile of his own, and told himself firmly that Lee’s enthusiasm was too saccharine for such an early (well, early-adjacent) (early-esque) (not early) morning. “Lee,” he managed, in the end, “how can I . . . er, where . . . what’s on the agenda?”

Slowly but surely, Lee’s smile dimmed: still sunny, but more comparable to the wintry light outside than anything truly warming. Gaara rolled his lips. A good servant, his father liked to crow, knew what their master was thinking before they said it. He was nobody’s master – and a stranger to Lee, besides – but he trusted they were both intelligent enough to know a shade had fallen over the conversation.

Lee straightened from his bow, and shook his glossy hair from his eyes. He had heavy eyebrows, and they’d knit tightly over his forehead. “Their Graces require your presence at the war council,” he said. It was Gaara’s turn to furrow his brow (not that it would show beyond a wrinkle, his red hair faint against brown skin).

“We aren’t at war,” he said, automatically.

“It’s just what it’s called.”

That much made sense. Even before the three warlords had wrestled a throne from the ashes of civil war, Konoha had been a violent nation. It had been their old royal lineage, the Uzumaki clan, that had first declared war on Suna, generations ago. That clan was all bones and unmarked graves, now, and there were no active troops on either front, but Gaara supposed the land’s habits might have died hard. He decided his best bet was a patented nod, slight and sagely. “Let’s be off” was all he said.

Lee’s smile was back, breaking across his face like the dawn – a real dawn, not some watered-down, wintry excuse. To be sure, there was a part of Gaara that knew it was out of deference. An instinctive response. Still, it prompted Gaara to straighten, and the same voice that had asked Lee to call him by name edged forward again. “I don’t suppose you’ll stick around, though,” he blurted out. “During the meeting. I mean, ‘war counselling’ sounds awfully dull.Doesn’t it? Diplomacy is, sometimes. Most times. Dull, that is.”

“Is it?” Lee seemed genuinely surprised, his eyes going doe-wide and his full lips parting in a tiny _“O.”_ “It seems so . . . I don’t know. _So_!”

Despite himself, Gaara had to laugh. “I suppose it can be ‘so,’” he admonished, and then, in what felt almost like a leaf out of Lee’s book, decided that whatever that meant, its conviction would only be bolstered by his very sunniest smile. “I’ll see you, then. Lee.”

There was a spray of freckles across Lee’s round cheeks, almost indiscernible against the deep copper of his skin – and then, slowly but surely, Gaara watched them disappear under a flush. “Gaara,” he whispered, with more reverence than he had any titles. Then, with a tiny wave – just a twinkling of his long fingers – Lee was gone.

The council meeting took place in Lord Shikamaru’s private parlour, at a round table littered with board games. There was a beautiful chessboard in abalone and tortoiseshell, the pieces all fine-carved marble, and an elegant diamond for nine-man morris. But there were other sets, foreign sets, as well; Gaara was surprised to see warped-looking boards for Ur and senet, and even Sunan games, like mancala and damah.

“They stimulate the mind,” said Lord Shikamaru, watching Gaara’s eyes wander over a playroom beyond any child’s wildest dreams. Lady Ino cast her gaze skyward, and Temari stifled a giggle.

“Or you’re just bored easily,” she teased him. It was Gaara’s turn to roll his eyes. He knew his sister was in no place to comment: she’d brought a well-worn romance novel to the war council, after all, and the pads of her thumbs were smudged with ink. It was quite all he could see of her. She’d shown up in her courtier’s uniform of abaya and fine hijab, but she’d paired them with a small forest’s worth of furs, blankets pinned haphazardly around her figure. Gaara wondered if it was physically possible to drown in fabric – Temari certainly seemed to be pushing that limit.

Lord Choji drummed his fingers along the table. He had large fingers, and so it made a large sound, thunderclaps that Gaara could feel in the stones of the floor. “He certainly is,” he admonished, shooting Lord Shikamaru a teasing smile. “So what say we get started?”

Though he was the one to egg them on, Gaara thought it worth noting Lord Choji procrastinated more than any of them. They’d been negotiating for some five minutes before the lunch service was ushered in, and the Konohans insisted the peace talks be brought to a halt: Lord Choji, specifically, had decided some half an ocean ago that they’d reconvene after _“just another piece of fish.”_

By the time they’d reached the finbones, Lord Shikamaru snapped. “Get it together, Choji,” he growled. His skin was sickly-pale against the dark shadows beneath his eyes. “I’d like to get this meeting done _before_ midwinter.”

“He has a point.”

Lady Ino spoke as though agreeing with her fellow regent pained her. For a moment, she reminded Gaara of a paler, washed-out Temari: even beyond blonde hair and cool green eyes, the two of them, princess and warlord, carried themselves with the same dangerous poise – they both seemed to balance effortlessly on the knife’s edge of anger. Lady Ino drew her fur stole tighter around her neck before she continued. “We need to put all our efforts into finalising any peace treaties before the Solstice,” she said, steepling her fingers. All was silent for a moment, and Gaara felt his and his siblings’ faint confusion slap as powerlessly against the warlords’ solemn confusion as the ocean did the cliffs.

He took it upon himself to speak up. “What happens at the Solstice?”

“Konoha doesn’t have much magic,” said Lord Shikamaru, “but what we do have is strongest at the Solstice. The longest night of the year.” With the window behind him and his litter of board games in front of him, he had the shortest shadow of any of them – but Gaara watched it loom across the council table as Lord Shikamaru schooled himself, light and shadow reacting to the magic buried deep beneath his pale skin. “The Solstice is a time of great import to the people – there are festivals, we hold a feast, Choji here single-handedly drags a fir tree into the ballroom because nobody else is strong enough to do it – but most important of all is the ritual.”

Once more, it fell to Gaara to press the meeting forward. “‘The ritual?’”

“The Rite of Spring.” Hope shot through Lady Ino’s voice like roots through soil, and Gaara felt dread dawn in his core as she spoke on. “It’s more important this year than ever. Most winters, we just bring out the damned grail and let people ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ over the thing. This year, though, we . . . well, we have the new court alchemist, and we have the physicians, and . . . and we have to _perform_ it. We _have_ to.” She sat ramrod-straight, pale eyes glittering like the snow outside. “We will cure the plague.”

The fish had been tasty. Salmon, Gaara thought, looking to the pink flesh and marbled fat left on the fine china of the court’s very best plates. Now, though, it soured on his tongue, and if he hadn’t known better – hadn’t known even the finest alchemists and strongest of djinn were no necromancers – he imagined the poor fish swimming inside of him, churning his stomach into a whirlpool and blocking off his throat.

 _The plague,_ he thought, dumbly. But another voice, colder and stronger, spoke above his addled mind:

_“The grail.”_

To his side, Kankuro tapped a manicured nail against his chalice. Any other time, Gaara would have spared the gesture no second thought. Perhaps his brother was thirsty (or decided to flout the religious conventions that kept him sober) perhaps he’d decided to test the quality of the silver. Now, Gaara felt as though Kankuro might have written his intentions in stark kohl across his forehead, right up there with those strange, ancient hieroglyphs.

“The Grail of the Fisher King, if my memory serves,” Gaara mumbled. Kankuro gave him an imploring look.

“Is that not just a myth?” he pretended to wonder, smiling softly. “Something to . . . to paint on stained glass windows?”

Lord Shikamaru rolled his eyes to high heaven, and began loudly running through a story the three of them knew all too well: how the Fisher King – the first monarch to rule Konoha or Suna, or any of the fertile lands north of the desert belt – had in his possession a great fancy cup blessed by the witches of (even older) old. If he shed blood against its enamelled walls, and if that blood were to then fall to the soil, or the sea, the earth would be blessed and healthy for the year to come. In centuries gone, every culture north of the Equator had learned the myth in their own way: here was the Cup of Jamshid, the Sampo, the Cornucopia. The Luck of Salsabil, to the Sunans. Everyone remembered the Fisher King.

But as hard as the Fisher King had worked – as ardently as he had bled for his people – Lord Rasa worked harder. The first law of alchemy was a simple one: the rule of equivalent exchange. If human blood shed into the chalice had the power to heal the land, surely the opposite held true: magical blood should have the opposite effect. But where,in these modern times, where oh where would he find an individual with magic in their veins?

Where in the world would he have found three half-djinn sorcerers, born and bred to fight for king and country?

Lord Shikamaru’s parlour was done up in the same granite as the rest of Castle Konohagakure, and any other time, Gaara might have found its presence comforting: might have steeled himself along the sweeping lines of the igneous stone, imagined his spine straightening like its tiny, neat crystals. Now, though, the endless expanse of grey blurred in front of him as his vision swam, and shocks shot through his body as he struggled from the table. “I have to go,” Gaara blurted out. “Um, to pray. It’s . . . it’s prayer time.”

He hadn’t bothered with a midday prayer in years, and he had no idea where he’d even go: where the Qibla was from this great stone fortress. Perhaps, a part of him wanted to protest, perhaps it wasn’t there. Perhaps this quest of theirs was godless in more ways than one.

But his siblings and the warlords all nodded him along, and the great wooden doors to the council chamber swung open for him silently.

A wall of sound met him as he stumbled from the chamber, and Gaara was grateful for the resistance in the air: for the effort it took to hear his thoughts above the din, for the soundwaves buffeting his heavy limbs. The distraction sharpened his mind, needling the thoughts of the grail away from it – especially as he turned a corner, and was met by a familiar smile.

“Your High— Gaara!”

Lee had swapped his serving tunic for a leather apron and little else. If pushing past the clatter had been taxing, for Gaara’s addled mind, meeting Lee’s eyes was a hectoring effort: though they were roughly of a height, Gaara felt his gaze lingering on the planes of Lee’s chest and shoulders.

“Lee.” Once again, Gaara figured it was as good a place to start as any. Then he straightened, feeling the embroidery on his collar scrape, ever so slightly, against his throat. “You . . . you didn’t wait at the war council meeting,” he tried to joke. Lee’s eyes went wide.

“Oh – I thought you were joking. I’d never be allowed— I’m, er, I’m sorry! I should—”

“I was joking,” Gaara scrambled to cut him off. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest, and it seemed to echo in the charged space between the two of them, sending the tension there jumping, haywire. For a moment, Lee was silent – a ruddy flesh stringing his faint freckles together again – but then he straightened, too, running a hand through his glossy hair.

“I don’t suppose you’re done in there,” he hazarded. Gaara shook his head, but Lee would not be deterred. “Because I, uh, was thinking – you know, if it isn’t too forward – that, um, you’d might like a tour of the castle? Since you got lost that time, I mean.”

Gaara felt twin patches of heat rise below his cheeks, and wondered – briefly – if he should just let the earth swallow him up then and there. (He could do that, after all. Really, that was well within his skillset.) The lie had settled uneasily in his throat, and much like the bland soups and gamey meats they’d seen flooding the banquet hall these past few days, it refused to go down.

“If I wouldn’t take too much of your time, that is.” Lee was rooted to the spot, but he hardly stood still: lithe and willowy, he swayed with the breezes and shouts carrying down the long hallway.

“Or I yours.” Gaara folded his arms across his chest, willing his heart to still and his lungs to settle. The heat had yet to dissipate from the thin skin of his face – rather, hot blood spread like magma over the brittle lines of his bones, and he was certain his flush was as red as his hair.

“Oh, piffle!”cried Lee, and Gaara barely had time to think, _Of_ course _he says “piffle,”_ when Lee clapped his hands together. “Of course not, Your Highness. _Gaara_. No, I’m just off to feed the dragons.”

“‘ _The dragons_?’”

“Mm-hmm! The dragons!”

Fear wandered down his spine like an army of icy-footed beetles, their chill warring against the flush of his skin; when Gaara came to, reverie in half-melted, half-shattered pieces before him, the only feeling he could really register was “clammy.” Suddenly, a midday prayer didn’t seem like that absurd of an idea.

A dull rattling above him shook him from the last of his thoughts, and Gaara whipped around just in time to see a tiny shadow cross the wall: one of Kankuro’s shabti, all but invisible under the cloaking spell protecting it. But no magic in the world would have hidden the fact that something was wrong. The minuscule mechanisms driving its spider legs had stopped working on one side, leading it to veer and sway as it dragged itself along, and the matte paint along its back was chipped and flaking. Worst of all, Gaara could sense telltale gaps in his magic: chinks in that invisible armour.

“These dragons,” he began. “Would they happen to be, ah, magical?”

“ _So_ magical,” gushed Lee, starry-eyed and breathless. Gaara thinned his lips. He doubted that he and Lee were thinking of the same crossed stars, but he had to push forward – for the mission’s sake.

“I’d love to tag along,” he made himself say. Lee _beamed_ , and Gaara felt his heart lurch. He was _so_ going to regret this.

He just hoped Lee wouldn’t, as well.

Gaara hadn’t quite known what to expect when Lee announced they were going to feed the dragons. It was, after all, nota hobby he’d ever really pursued. What did dragons even eat? Naughty children? Jackalopes?

Djinn?

As it turned out, today, they’d be serving the dragons fish: Lee had taken it upon himself to avoid showing Gaara too many pig or cow carcasses, a simple gesture that made him both immensely grateful and deeply dreadful. Then again, Gaara reflected, perhaps he’d have felt safer with animals he actually recognised. Lee had led them to a watchtower on the castle’s outer walls, where a man with silver hair and scarves swaddled around his scarred face had given him an armful of sea serpent. The creature must have been nine, ten feet long, and Lee just draped it easily across his (nearly bare) shoulders, humming to himself as he adjusted to its weight.

“You’re . . . quite strong,” said Gaara, dumbly. Lee was haring a few paces ahead of him, and spun on his heel to meet his eye again, grinning all the while.

“Why, thank you!” he trilled. “It’s all in the way you hold your back. And your hips, and . . . ”

He went on, babbling cheerily about all the ways the body’s various muscles wove together, a delicate tapestry of pushing and pulling in tandem, tendons rippling across joints like threads on a loom. Gaara could hardly focus. Lee spoke each of his muscles’ names like an incantation, and to Gaara, they seemed just as flashy – just as distracting. _What is it Temari always says, when she goes poking at the crown jewels?_ He tried to remember, as he failed to focus on the tasks at hand. It came to him in a tumble. _“No harm in looking.”_

Lee was no tiara, but he was beautiful, all the same: the snow settled across his skin like quicksilver rolling across alchemists’ bronze, and he moved like a dancer across the icy flagstones. Perhaps there wasn’t any harm in _“looking.”_ Gaara would tell himself that, anyway – and he would feel the snow melt against his burning cheeks, stinging the dry skin there.

They reentered the castle through a flimsy side door, wooden slats bound halfheartedly by rusted iron bands. This, Gaara surmised, was the servants’ entrance; sure enough, as a stream of watery light flowed through the gaps in the door, he could see long-legged shadows dart across its surface like minnows. “This way!” called Lee, voice muffled by the great serpent cast across his form. “It’s not far beneath the castle proper.”

“What isn’t?”

Lee spoke like it should have been the most obvious thing in the world. “The Akshaya Patra,” he explained. “You know. The grail.”

Gaara could feel dread clamp stiff fingers around his heart, and his mouth went desert-dry. Lee seemed to have mistaken his silence for confusion, and had launched into an animated retelling of the tale, filled with colourful descriptions and melodic, foreign names. Gaara wasn’t listening. He couldn’t. His head was empty, save for one sole leaden thought:

 _How in_ hell _are we going to manage this?_

The hallway opened, after what felt like leagues (but was barely, according to Lee, and the enormous weight he carried, barely a quarter klick), into an enormous cavern, and though torches dotted the walls, there was no abating that darkness. It swirled and eddied before them, crashing in on itself like the whims of some great ocean. But the moving shadows were something Gaara felt, rather than saw. In truth, he really couldn’t see anything: it was a darkness more total, more absolute, than even the cloudiest, most starless of nights. It was permanent—

“ _Aah_!”

“Sorry!” came a voice, not sounding sorry at all. Any echo of the word was quickly muffled by the encroaching darkness, but soon enough, something lanced through it: a strange, whitish glow, cold and scorching at once. Gaara turned slowly to face it, blinking to adjust his eyes to the contrast. Slowly but surely, two faces appeared: a young man and woman, carrying with them the faint scent of carrion.

“Oi up, Lee!”

The first voice called out again, and Gaara watched the young woman’s face blink out of the light just as a sharp _“whoosh!”_ filled the air. Lee answered with a startled kind of grunt, and Gaara felt his grip fumble, a cyclone of flailing limbs beside him. “A warning might’ve been nice, Tenten,” he sighed. The young woman, Tenten, flickered back into view with a teasing smile.

“Never!” she shot back. “We have to keep you on your toes.” Her words were coloured by the same singsong accent Gaara sometimes heard from the mathematicians and numerologists of the Far East, and even from ten paces back, he could see how a smile played at the edges of her sharp dark eyes.

“We bagged a deer, though,” another voice shot in, ever helpful. His was a baritone with a steady timbre – the kind of voice that held an unspoken authority. It belonged to the young man, who had pale violet shadows beneath his pale violet eyes, and a wearily affectionate smile.

“Gaara,” said Lee, at last – setting the fish and the deer carcass on the stone floor below him – “it’s an honour to present my dearest friends: the deputy to the steward, Miss Tenten Pema Sherpa, and the apprentice physician, Mr. Neji Hyuga.”

Tenten did not seem all too perturbed by Gaara’s presence – she was already slinging the sea serpent over her shoulders, and did not spare Gaara a second glance as she began to push into the darkness – but Gaara saw the young man, Neji, straighten.

“Your Highness,” he said. Then he lowered his head. “I have studied in Suna,” he went on. “Your people are some of the finest physicians this world has ever seen.”

Gaara felt his cheeks grow warm, and doubly so as Lee laid a congratulatory hand on either of their shoulders. When he did speak again, his voice was house-mouse meek and just as squeaky. “Dragons,” he managed.

Neji sighed. “The dragontamer is sick,” he explained. He didn’t need to say sick with _what_. “Expected to make a full recovery, but . . . ”

“Until then it’s our job,” Lee chirped, cheerful as ever. Neji stiffened.

“It isn’t safe,” he protested. “It isn’t _right_.”

Tenten shrugged, and the faint smell of death clinging to the serpent’s scales grew that much stronger with the motion. “It’s our job,” she said firmly, parroting Lee. “Lantern, Neji?”

He thrust it forward wordlessly, and Gaara watched its otherworldly glow scatter the shadows of his face, warping them into something ghoulish. (Cadaverous, thought Gaara, at first, but that seemed too much of an omen.) “It’s dragonfire,” he explained, watching Gaara’s gaze linger on the dancing blue-white flame. “Nothing hotter in the world.”

Gaara frowned. In the darkness, the earth’s presence around him was just that much stronger: he could feel every inch of rock they’d wound their way under, and every degree of the burning magma below him. He wasn’t scared of fire, per se, but he didn’t trust it. It wasn’t something you could touch or weigh or control. Not like the earth. And so Neji’s promise of impossible heat only served to make him that much more chilly.

“I think they’re starting,” said Neji, at last. He turned the lantern into the gloom, and Gaara watched the inky shadows edge slowly backwards from its crackling glow. And then he saw them.

There were two of them, but two of them, Gaara knew, could have taken out a small country. Maybe even a large one. They stood taller than any animal he’d ever seen (and King Shamon had once kept elephants), and for the first time, Gaara felt he could not trust the earth below him, as their great bony claws scraped across its surface – the screech filling the air more totally than even that heady darkness. In the wavering lamplight, he could only see glimpses of their great leathery wings, but he could see all too clearly how they folded in like Damascus steel, wider than ship’s sails, but carefully controlled. Then the head – the head! A faint gamey scent was the only indication that Lee or Tenten had stepped forward, but there was no missing that first dragon’s head. Boulder-big and just as stony, with eyes like embers and—

_“Kssh!”_

—and real embers. Real fire! The shadows swirling around the cavern broke around the vague shape of a deer as a bolt of brilliant white flame fanned across the floor, barely a foot above their heads. Gaara’s first instinct was to throw his arms in front of his face, as though warding off a physical blow – but ahead of him, two servants weren’t so fortunate. Gaara heard half a dictionary’s worth of curses in about four different languages as Lee and Tenten heaved the sea serpent above their heads, ready to throw it into that charbroiled feast. But would they be quick enough?

_“KSSSH!”_

“Lee!”

There was a jumble of images before him, in stark blacks and whites – shadows and ash and fire, warring against the flickering memories of dark eyes and a smile like starlight. Gaara didn’t think to try to piece them together. As the gloom retreated from the dragon’s head, and another jet of flame began sparking between its huge white teeth, Gaara lunged. The floor was granite, much like everything else in Konoha, but it could have been obsidian, for all he cared. Gaara knew this choreography well, after all, no matter the dance floor. He ground his heel into, well, the ground, driving all his weight – and the weight of all his djinnee magic – through his step. He felt a fissure open before him, the rock on either side of it crumbling to sand, and wasting little time in shooting up.

Dragonfire may have been hot, but Gaara had made a lot of sand.

The four of them were coughing by the time they stumbled into the corridor again, still blinking smoke from their eyes as they wandered out of the servants’ exit. When Gaara shook his head, greyish sand fell from the red curls plastered from his forehead. Some of it tinkled on the way down: the heat at blasted it into glass.

“So,” he wheezed, “those are dragons.”

“They – _hff!_ – they guard the grail,” said Neji, unnecessarily. He had a white-knuckled grip on the lantern, and he stuck it in a snowbank to extinguish its flame. Gaara thought about speaking up – wouldn’t they need it again later? – but thought better of it. At the moment, he didn’t want to see much dragonfire, either.

Neji made some vague excuse about needing to get back to work, and Tenten didn’t bother: she just slumped off, swiping at the ash covering her face. After a beat, only Gaara and Lee were left in the courtyard, alone to watch the snow and the embers settle in matching adagio around them.

“You saved my life.” Lee wasn’t always smiling, of course – it would have been physically impossible – but Gaara had never seen him frown. “Thank you.”

Gaara was silent. He knew that frown. He knew it like he did the sandy expanse of his own skin, like Kankuro’s ceaseless marionette facade, like Temari’s whirlwind anger. He knew it like he did the cramped laboratories that had replaced his childhood home, and knew it the way he most certainly didn’t know his mother.

“It’s true,” said Lee, at last. “People say . . . they say the three of you . . . ” _They say we aren’t right. They say we’re “_ dhampir” _– monsters._

But then Lee smiled that brilliant smile, batting long lashes. “You saved my life,” he laughed. “You, a prince, and me, a— huh!”

He’d doubled over in laughter. It was a high, full sound, like the chiming of temple bells, and when Lee straightened, Gaara saw tears glittering at the corners of his wide, dark eyes. “That settles it,” he panted, setting a hand on Gaara’s shoulder. “Oh, that settles it. We’re friends now, you know.”

“We are?”

Gaara’s cheeks were burning, and his stomach fluttering, hurtling from his chest to his gut at speeds even a dragon couldn’t have matched. Normally, he lived in two dimensions: with the earth below him and around him, Gaara had always known where to place his feet. Now, the world was whirling away from him, the sky opening up. “We’re friends,” Lee had said. Wasn’t he in for a—

“—basically a genie, right?”

Lee, apparently, was no stranger to the third dimension: he barrelled ever upward and onward, and Gaara had barely had the time to mull over his words before he’d begun swinging their hands back and forth. In the end, he could only balk.

“It’s what everyone says,” Lee explained. “You guys are genies. And if we’re friends, can I get three wishes?”

“We’re djinn,” Gaara corrected him, giving a gentle smile. But Lee’s palms were warm against his knuckles, and the faint rebuke melted into a wide grin, growing heat pell-mell at his cheeks. “So I can manage one, I think. If it’s reasonable.”

“Come to the servants’ midwinter party with me,” Lee said. “Tomorrow night. That’s my big, djinn-y wish, YourMost Life-Saving Highness.”

Gaara felt as though he’d been hit by one of Temari’s lightning bolts. Suddenly, he was acutely aware of Lee’s hands on his, and of the fact that Lee’s skin was warm – beyond warm, even as the winter chill blasted the fire from his wiry shoulders – and of each of the thousand tiny details that made up the serving boy in front of him, a mosaic of promises. Finally, Gaara could only laugh alongside him. “I would love to come,” he told Lee – and he meant it. “But what in the world do I wear?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dear santa claus. this christmas i'd love some coworkers who understand that i can't actually wait on table thirteen right now because i'm running behind on my naruto fanfiction


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